


Seal Skin

by Iridogorgia



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Character Development, Description of nudity, Gen, Just a little thing I had in mind, Selkies, exploration of crew, no romance for once
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 16:48:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18721069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iridogorgia/pseuds/Iridogorgia
Summary: Living things never come into the Devil’s Triangle.  So why, when Captain Salazar looked down through a hole in the ship, does he see a pair of eyes?





	Seal Skin

**Author's Note:**

> Captain Salazar and crew were trapped in the Devil's Triangle for about forty years. This takes place maybe a decade-ish into that sentence. I had this idea in my head of an interaction between him and another magical creature, and this is the result. Enjoy!

The first thing he saw was the eyes.

Golden, reflecting the weak light afforded by the ambiance of the cursed Devil’s Triangle, set in a long face that he could barely see through the dark waves.  A seal of some kind was his first thought. He’d seen them aplenty in Spain, on the docks, sunning themselves with faux smiles on their little faces that made all the girls, and some of his men, swoon.  There would often be pods of them on his travels, different shades of black and brown, but always barking lazily from rocky islands or darting curiously up to the sides of the ship, as if begging for scraps.

This face, these eyes, didn’t remind him of those playful, doglike creatures that he hadn’t thought of in twenty years.

Eyes narrowing, flicking over his face, and Captain Salazar almost stepped back.

This was a _predator._

‘Be careful,’ disused instincts rasped at him, ‘This thing will rip you apart and hunger for more.’

It blinked, slowly, and turned it’s head away, it’s sleek physique barely rippling the surface of the water.  Dark body, a gray bordering on black, with irregular spots. And long. Very long. He felt his eyebrows raise and fought the urge to whistle, an action he wasn’t sure his ruined face could still perform.  If his eyes weren’t deceiving him, this creature could be more than three meters in length.

Common seals were half that.

He was standing in the hold, having been wandering the confines of the prison that had once been his pride, and had seen movement through a broken section of the bottom of the hull.  One place of many where the ship was open to the elements, but commonly only revealed dark, still pools of seawater. But then, there were _eyes._

As the last flicker of shadowy fin disappeared into the depth, his mind started whirring.  He hadn’t seen another living creature since he and his men had died, too many years ago for him to count.  Decades. Eons. This accursed, evil place kept him from remembering properly.

The only things that washed up were already dead. He’d experimented on the corpse of a shark, a hammerhead, and had infused it with enough of his… magic?  Curse? Whatever it was that animated him, he manipulated it enough to manipulate the cadaver. The first time it had sluggishly opened cloudy eyes, he’d laughed in a way that made his Lieutenant frown.  He’d been practicing on skeletal birds before and since, picked clean by the elements, much to the annoyance of one of his younger crew members.

The flock liked to fight over Officer Cortez’s hat.

But never, since he had been imprisoned here, had a live animal drifted in through the terrible spires of the entrance.  Sometimes men, often men, and his men always _dispatched_ them for the next world swiftly.  They were never allowed to linger in what had become his terrible home.  He always left one, though, to tell the tale, but they were quickly and cruelly thrown through the entrance to sink or swim.  His men often made sport of betting with whatever treasures they’d acquired on the odds of one or the other.

He sucked his back molars for a second, staring at the spot where he’d seen the pinniped.  He was sure that’s what it was. That face, those fins… a mythical one, potentially a monster, but it was _alive_ and he felt the need to sink himself down and look for it.  He felt his attention drift, eyes still on the hole in the floor.

He was caught entirely off guard when a dark head, triangular and narrow, erupted from the hole with its jaw unhinging as it shot toward him. Those massive, broad jaws were lined with sharp, yellowing teeth, rows reaching all the way back into its fleshy red maw, and he found himself stumbling back in surprise.  The rest of the huge body couldn’t fit through the opening, and it screeched in frustration, strange and echoing, slitted nostrils flaring, and he quickly realized this was like no seal he’d ever seen before. Under its jaw and down was all pale with black markings, the upper half, when it wasn’t wet, he would be willing to bet was either dark silver or blue-black.

The eyes were no longer shining, reflecting light.  They were completely black and trained on him, smaller and more widely set than the sweet harbor-based seals than he remembered from life.  It closed its jaw, small whiskers twitching, and regarded him silently. Its nostrils flared as if scenting him, and it made a derisive sounding snort.

‘Intelligent,’ that instinct whispered at him again, ‘This is not a normal animal.’

He sat on a crate, one that Officer Santos had insisted on liberating from a British ship last year, or maybe ten years ago, but it held steady beneath his full weight.  He tapped his rusting iron sword against the floorboards, and the seal watched the movement cautiously. It swayed its head slightly, looking him up and down.

He opened his mouth, but before he could ask a question, it bellowed again, once loudly followed by three short barks, and disappeared beneath the waves again.

There was the sound of boots on the stairs, his men rushing down.  By the time the entire crew clustered around him, looking about with weapons drawn, he was smiling.

“Capitán,” Lieutenant Lesaro called cautiously, turning in a circle, “We heard a noise.  What _was_ that?”

His lips peeled back into a fearsome expression, “Something _new_.”

His men muttered around him, but Salazar didn’t stop staring at the hole at the bottom of the ship.  He didn’t speak for a long time.

 

* * *

 

He waited four days on the deck of the Mary before he saw the seal slip through the water again.

It came up for breath, a puff of mist and the familiar _woosh_ heralding its arrival.  He stared at the spot until the seal stared back, eyes lost in the shadow of its narrow head.  He didn’t have to see it’s gaze to feel the weight of it on him. He cocked his head, and it followed his movement.

“What are you?” he called, first in Spanish and then again in English.  The seal barked at him, and he felt his men pause in their work around him, and their excitement started to quietly fill the air.  None of them were brave enough to run up to the railing, but his Lieutenant stepped cautiously behind him.

“Is that a… seal?” He asked dubiously.

Salazar didn’t turn around, “I think it _looks_ like a seal.  If it _is_ one is another matter entirely.”

The seal turned deliberately and arched elegantly through the waves.  It started swimming east, toward the entrance and paused to look behind, as if beckoning him.  Captain Salazar’s smiled deepened and he rapped his sword on the deck five times. “Vámonos,” he snapped, and his men scrambled to their stations as the Silent Mary turned with a labored groan, her wood creaking and rotted sails flapping.

They followed the sleek creature, who rolled under the waves and darted in odd directions.

Once they’d gone as far as they could go, the Mary’s bow pressed against the solid magical barrier that kept them trapped in this hell, he held up his hand to signal them to stop.  The seal rolled out into the moonlight, the light dimming and dying before it reached Captain Salazar and his crew.

He felt an old resentment welling, an older hatred unearthing itself under that, and black bile started to stream down his chin.  His rage infested his men, and he knew that when the seal looked back at them, it would see a sea of glowing red and yellow eyes framed by cursed blackness.  He heard swords being lifted from scabbards and the beginnings of snarls that would grow to become war cries if given the chance.

Unable to control himself, he shouted his frustration into the dark, his men swelling up around him like a stream, their joined cacophony ringing through the night.

The seal had hauled it’s massive body up onto a fairly flat rock, slick with seaweed and algae, no barnacles clinging, no crabs, nothing living but whatever flotsam the waves flung upon it.  It was painted all dark but for the shine of the moon on sleek, wet skin.

As Salazar and his men yelled, the seal reared up and back, taller than any of them, and _roared._  It was a deep, angry sound, and its jaws were unhinged entirely to display huge fangs in a display meant to terrorize.

The roar shrank and distorted, turning into a very human, very _feminine_ scream.  Salazar chopped his hand down sharply as the body of the seal twisted, turned, and he almost couldn’t believe what his eyes were telling him.  It was like it was _unzipping_ itself from the inside, like it was being tucked into a pocket of space and time too small to fit it.

Within the span of half a minute, a human woman was standing in front of them, a soaked red coat lined with sealskin flung onto the rocks, and her scream pattered into panting as she breathed heavily.

The ghost crew was frozen on the deck of the Mary, eyes trained on the very naked woman in front of them.

She was pale, practically glowing bone-white under the moon, but her hair was dark.  It was enormous, black curls filled with seaweed and fluffing out over her breasts and down to the tops of her thighs, leaving one bare strip of skin showing down the middle.  Her face glared at them from beneath all of it, eyes the same reflective gold that he remembered under the water, and her lips were peeled back in an angry grimace. Her teeth were small, crooked, and dirty.

None of them had seen a naked woman since they’d left Spain, and two of them had never seen one at all.

As his youngest Officers, Cortez and Moss, had fits behind him, he studied the creature that had elicited such a human action from his men.

She was muscled, he noticed, more than most women he could remember.  Strong legs, feet gripping firmly to the slick surface, legs lightly dusted with dark hair.  Her thighs were thick and he saw the muscles flex as she balanced on the uneven rock. Despite her wide stance, her thighs touched at the apex and framed a wild patch of dark curls that his gaze cooly slid over.  Her abdomen, what he could see of it, was firm but had a small pouch of fat above her pubis, and her skin was stretched tight over her sternum. There was no hint of cleavage, her clavicle was pronounced and the muscles in her long neck were strained from the force of her fearsome expression.  Her arms were strong, forearms dusted with more dark hair and her hands were held in rough, claw-like positions. She carried them awkwardly half-raised at the elbow, as if she’d forgotten how to use such long appendages.

‘She’s probably used to using her mouth,’ his mind helpfully supplied.  He remembered her lunging at him that dark night, and acknowledged that if he’d been living and with slower reflexes, she could have taken an arm, or a leg, clean off.  Or, he thought, if she’d had enough space, even his head.

She gave him something that was probably supposed to be a smile, her breath hissing from between her teeth.  “You asked,” she rasped, as if she had not talked in a long time, “what I am. I’m a _woman_.”  She slid her ample hips in a slow side-to-side that he knew his men followed with their glowing eyes.  She laughed, the sound closer to a bark, and cast one hand at the coat behind her, “When I wear _that_ , I become a man-eating _god._ ”  She bared her teeth at them in an unfriendly expression.

He heard muttering behind him, snatches of Spanish and English, before one of his most trusted men, Officer Magda, slid up to his side, “Capitán, what do you think?  Should we kill this… I’m not sure it is a woman, I think it is some kind of-” He struggled with his words for a moment, shifting on his blown-apart legs, “Some kind of _demon_.”

As soon as Salazar turned his eyes away from her to answer him, she gave another loud shout that drew all of them and smothered any conversation.

She was glaring at them, mouth parted in a sneer that would have looked quite threatening on the long face of her pinniped counterpart. She demanded, “I answered you!  Now, return. What are _you?_ ”  She let her eyes rove over all of them, eyes lingering on his men that had been hit hardest by the blast.

Lesaro, with his arm floating in long ribbons around his shoulder.

Santos, with the huge hole in his belly, blasting his uniform to ashes in the front and back.

Lopez, with everything gone but half his face.

Salazar himself, forever drowned, unendingly caught in a current he could not escape, with half his head floating in the water.

They regarded her in silence.

“We’re cursed,” Salazar said quietly, the gravity of his words pulling his men closer.  “Righteous men cursed by this evil place to neither live nor die until we can be released to seek our revenge.”

She pulled her head back and cocked it in a decidedly seal-like gesture.  Her eyes, which had faded to the dark of a human, flicked absently over the deck of his men.  “Interesting,” she murmured, and he cocked his head back at her. A stubborn sliver of moonlight shot through the cursed entrance to illuminate him, and she studied the way his hair floated around his broken skull.

“What kind of seal are you?”  From behind him, the oldest member of his crew, Velez, with his enormous, pristine white beard that he still groomed carefully every day, called a cautious, respectful inquiry.  Velez had always been the most superstitious of them all, the most respectful toward creatures of the sea. His disappointment at Salazar’s decision to go into the Triangle had been the hardest to bear after the fact.  But now he pushed his way from the back of the crowd to the railing.

The woman’s eyes lingered on his missing left forearm and the skeletal, ashy remains of his right leg.

“I don’t know,” she answered, looking back at the coat again.  The red of it bled nearly black in the cool moonlight. “I wasn’t born like this.  I was a seamstress.” One hand instinctually came up to try and comb through her matted black curls.  “Tall, for a girl, I was married late and looking for employment. My husband was a lazy man, I only accepted his hand to please my mother and ailing father.  I got work in a little shop by the docks. A man, a deckhand from a merchant's vessel, came in with a parcel of red wool and the strangest looking seal pelt I’d ever seen.  He was rushed, jittery, suspicious. He told me to make the coat out of the wool, lined with the sealskin, and to make it fit my frame. He said his new _wife_ was the same proportions as me, something I couldn’t believe.”

She paused to raise an eyebrow at the crew, as if waiting for them to agree with her.  Nobody moved, but Velez nodded shortly and she continued, “I made the coat. The shell, the red, fit well enough, loose where I needed it to be loose so I sewed the sealskin into the interior as best I could.  When I tried it on with the skin pinned in place, I felt strange. I needed to be _cold_ , I needed to be in the _sea_.  I want to… bite.  I had a taste in my mouth of fat and blood, but-”  Her eyes had gone dreamy, looking past all of them, and her tongue darted out to lick her lower lip, teeth nibbling it after.

Salazar heard Cortez and Moss behind him practically moan.

He rapped his sword against the Mary once, and she snapped back to attention.  She worked her mouth soundlessly for a moment, mouth stretching too wide, like she wanted to bark instead of talk.  After a minute, she croaked out, “I woke up like that. In the sea. I was eating… something. Small and fleshy, maybe a bird?  Maybe another seal? I don’t remember. I never went back to land.”

Velez thanked her quietly for her story, then made his way to Salazar’s side, “That seal is made for the cold.  The deep cold. I have heard a legend, in my youth, from an Irishman.” His soft Spanish was meant for Salazar’s ears only, but the rest of the crew was straining to listen in.  “A woman who wore a sealskin. A seal in the water, but she could take it off and become a woman again, to dance on the beach. Steal the sealskin, and she’d be forced to wed and obey the man who held it.”

“Crude,” sniffed Officer Magda, turning his nose up.

Officer Velez cast his gaze behind in him reproach before continuing, quieter, “The man who gave her the skin likely didn’t want the creature, the Irishman called it a ‘selkie’, to ever gain it back.  I’d dismissed it as the ravings of a drunkard, but… what else could she be? She’s wearing magic that is not meant for her, perhaps she could be persuaded-”

The woman was staring at them mistrustfully, stepping back toward the sea.  She put one hand on the edge of her coat. “I’ve been hunted before,” she spat, “I know what planning looks like.”

“Detener!  Stop!” Salazar commanded, and she froze.  He frowned at her, “You are _magic_ , whether you like it or not.  You could _help_ us.  We need to-”

“No,” She shook her head, long ropes of hair swaying down her back.  “I am done helping men. I have taken to _eating_ them instead.”  Her mouth split into a terrible smile, and Salazar raised one eyebrow.  “Just because I have not left the sea does not mean I have not sat on _rocks._  It does not mean I have not seen the worst of men who think any woman is for their taking.  It does not mean I have not drug them down to the deep, to flounder. I have delivered some to The Flying Dutchman _personally._ ”

“The Flying-” Lesaro sputtered next to him.

“Yes,” she cut in, allowing her hair to fall forward and cover her face, “A man with a curse upon him, worse than yours, and he does not fear _death._ ”  Her hand dug into the soft fur at the edge of the coat.

“Enough,” Salazar spat, slicing his hand through the air.  He pressed against the barrier, ignoring the uncomfortable pressure as it pressed back.  “We need a compass to break our curse. From a pirate, Jack Sp-”

She screamed, a short, sharp, piercing sound.  It amplified around them, and Velez flinched back.  She looked at them with rage, “Did you not _listen?_ Men never listen!  I am not helping you, I am not searching for a compass, and if I find a Jack, I am going to rip his _head_ off his _shoulders._ ”  Her head swayed slightly, and she looked behind them.  “It’s so _warm._  When I am in the skin, it is too warm.  I want ice. I want freezing, dark depths.  I must go.” Her voice had gotten lower with each word, rougher, and she drew the coat closer to her.

“Wait-”

“Why _should_ I?”  She pulled the coat on one arm, wool dripping.  Even from far away, they could all smell the sodden fiber.  “Why should I wait? For what purpose? I am done pleasing others.  I am alone, I need never marry, I need never depend on anyone again.  When I am in the water, I am _strong._  I can swim faster than these legs can run.  I have crushed men’s throats with as much effort as breaking a brittle stick.  You hate your curse, but my condition is a _gift._ ”

“Your name,” Salazar said tightly, as she roughly put her arm through the second hole.  She stopped and looked at him in surprise.

“My- Nobody has asked for my name.  You first,” she added suspiciously.

“Capitán Armando Salazar,” he stated proudly, “And my men, the crew of La Maria Silenciosa.  The Silent Mary. The pride of the Spanish Armada.”

She worked her jaw silently for a minute, before clicking her teeth together and sighing, “I do not remember my name.  I remember that I hated it, a plain English name for a plain English peasant. You can name me. I do not care. Spanish names are often beautiful.  There was one time, at the shop-” Her voice drifted off and her eyes turned dreamy. She was lost in her memories for a moment.

“Sirena,” blurted out young Officer Moss, little Antonio, who had always been smitten with folklore.  La Maria’s first voyage had also been his, and they had ended it together in the Triangle. He had spent much of the time alongside Velez, coaxing old stories out of him, and his favorite had always been the mermaids.  The woman’s dark eyes shifted to him now, one brow quirked up in surprise, and he stuttered in broken English, “You… you look like a Sirena.”

His men had been completely out of line, and his sense of order grated against what was left of his spine, but he bit his own tongue and allowed it.

“Sirena,” she enunciated slowly, fingers digging into the thick seal fur along the edges of her coat.  She batted her long, thick eyelashes at Officer Moss, who’s cracked face was turned down shyly. “If you come closer, I would give you a gift for such a beautiful name.”  Almost instantly, Salazar felt the attempt at a spell hook into them. His vision wavered, and the woman in front of him was replaced by a willowy enchantress, glossy curls and thick, ruby lips, with acres of sun-kissed skin-

It was only the iron bar of his arm that kept young Antonio from jumping over the railing.

“You are a _siren_ ,” Velez breathed, eyes wide.  All of the men were blinking, shaking their heads.  “Old magic, ancient magic, to lure-”

“I don’t know what I am,” she spat, frowning viciously.  “It just happens. The original owner of this skin obviously wasn’t human, able to turn into the monster that I now wear, and it feels powerful, but it also feels loose.  Like I don’t quite fit, I don’t quite belong. It’s growing to fit me, or I’m growing to fit it, but this skin will always hold some secrets.” She closed the coat around her tighter and turned away.

“Where will you go?”  Captain Salazar’s voice was very soft.

She pointed with one arm, “That way.  Something is telling me to go that way.”  She bounced on the balls of her feet, obviously uncomfortable with being out of the water for so long.

Looking back at them, they clustered around to see her as she called back, voice high and tight, “I can’t help you.  It’s not just that I won’t, but I can’t. I can’t be out of the sea long enough to be of any use. It _hurts._ ”

“Do you know anything of Spain?”  Lieutenant Lesaro seemed determined to get something useful out of this encounter, and he gave her his most imposing look.

She shook her head, “A seamstress on the shore, remember?  I know very little. There was a war? It might still be going on, maybe not.  I’ve been in the water for a long time. Maybe a king died?” She shrugged at them.

A thousand questions swirled in his head, but without a way to capture her, a way to hold her, he could not force her to answer.  “If you see Jack Sparrow,” he said abruptly, “Tell him _death_ is coming straight for him.”

She held her head high and stepped into the surf.  She opened her mouth, then closed it and smiled.

Every member of the crew found themselves blinking at once, and when they opened their eyes collectively, she was gone.  There was a sharp bark of a seal from out in the distance, and a dark triangle floated up, a fin in a parody of a wave. Then the sleek curve of a back, and she vanished beneath the waves.

Salazar knew, in some deep part of himself, that he would never see her or her like again.

“Best of luck, Lady Sirena,” Antonio murmured into the dark.  The Mary groaned and without waiting for permission, drew them back from the discomfort of the barrier and slid further back into the darkness.  Salazar’s yellow eyes stayed trained on the entrance until it was a small pinprick of light in the distance.

**Author's Note:**

> Sirena is a leopard seal, which wouldn't officially be 'discovered' for about another hundred years. That's why nobody knows what kind of seal she is. I imagined that the man who caught the leopard-seal-selkie wanted to get rid of the skin permanently, so did what she mentioned in the story. So there's a very angry selkie stuck in England who will never get her seal skin back. I bent a lot of mythology for this story. Please let me know what you thought!


End file.
